I ponder care for others ...

My Little Buddy left on a jet plane yesterday for a much-deserved weekend of fun and relaxation in Houston with her cousin Phyllis Cole. Little Pal has been through a lot in the last few years, including the sale and subsequent demolition of her family home, built by her father’s hands on nights and weekends, after long days in cotton fields, when she was still just a twinkle in his eye. No two people ever doted on a child as Julius and Hazel Cole doted on their daughter. And she returned it stroke by stroke.

Then, a few days ago, she watched her last parent leave this life.

Regret? I suppose she’s had a few, but if there ever was a child who watched over and cared for her parents more loyally or faithfully, I’d like to know about it. It prompts me, this morning, to offer a few thoughts on final care. It is a particularly exhausting and trying experience to dedicate one’s life to a caring experience that offers no chance for cure.

To borrow a thought from Thomas Gray, the paths of final care “lead but to the grave.”

We never thought we would be placing the dear person I called “The Lady Hazel” in a nursing home. After all, her daughter was, by education and training, a Registered Nurse Practitioner. A person in her keep would have to be awfully sick before nursing home care would be required, wouldn’t they?

We underestimated things, including the process of caring for one who, because of the ravages of advanced dementia, had lost both the will and ability to move. Try assisting someone, who may appear frail, in meeting all the essential functions of life on a daily basis. After seven years, we made the painful decision to seek professional help. We opted for nursing home care.

Allow me to say a few words about it.

We had experience with two facilities in Central Arkansas. In both cases, we found the highest level of attention and concern. We found no fault with either. Perhaps we appreciated it all the more because we knew, first-hand, the trials of caring for, what the Galilean might have included as “the least of those among us.” Perhaps those who seek every opportunity to find fault with, and sue over, the slightest perceived neglect, have never experienced the necessity of removing a comatose patient from a bed for daily care.

Many of Hazel’s nursing home companions required such intimate care. Some didn’t. Some appeared to have been able to live at home with family if the family had been willing. One can only guess as to whether the unwilling were among the first to find fault with the care received. Me? I hypothesize a correlation.

It reminds me somehow of an experience I had as a young planner. For a project we had, the firm sent me to interview a young doctor of theology who was serving his ministry by managing an assisted care facility owned by his church. The talk turned to the topic of family visitation.

“Would you like to know?” he said, “who are the most pleased with, and who are the most heartbroken over visits from their family?”

I assumed it had to do with frequency of visits.

“No,” he said. “If a child says he or she can only come, say every two weeks, but makes that visit on schedule without fail, a parent is satisfied. But some promise weekly visits and miss half the appointed times. I’ve seen an elderly person sit with a packed suitcase waiting in the lobby for a weekend visit home, only to be forgotten.” That’s what brings heartaches, including to those who have to watch it.”

We’ll never know if Hazel even knew when her daughter visited. If she did, she knew one thing. She could count on it.

The Galilean knows that I am a “cultural Christian” and not a literal one. But I do believe in saints who walk this earth.

I’m married to one.

Yeah. I've been lucky.

Overcoming Guilt

I am, as most people know, about one wheel short of a semi-trailer rig. Take, for example, the concept of guilt. Oddly, I don’t feel guilty about having told some lesser being off, using swear words in at least four languages. No, in fact, I brag about such antics with Philosophy Club members who meet, from time to time, at E.J’s on the corner of 6^th and Center streets in my beloved city of Little Rock. They tend to guffaw at my antics and that makes me smile.

On the other hand, I feel guilty when I pick a turnip green, shredding its life in my fingers. I might add that such guilt only lasts until said plant, along with a crowd of its brothers and sisters, has been thoroughly washed, seasoned, boiled until it is tender and tasty, and served with other victims of planticide: juicy corn kernels made into a thick wholesome bread and accompanied by buttermilk.  Guilt only extends so far in my world, or so I'd like to believe.

Why bring this up? The latest guilt-laden escapade of mine involves a small wooden table. We, my wife and I, obtained it like most of the hundred thousand or so objects we own. People con us into taking them, she buys them at flea markets, people leave them to us, she picks them up from piles of discarded trash, she swaps her pal Nick Nicholson something for them, we inherit them, or people leave them at our doorstep, ring the doorbell, and run away.

Anyway, I have, after hours of sanding and stripping, reduced this table to near its natural state. This effort revealed that the top comprises a number of woods of different shades, textures, colors, and grain. Was this arrangement deliberate? We would have to travel back a hundred years, find an artisan, and beg for the truth. To hell with that.

What I want to do is paint it and use it as a “splash of color” in a lonely corner of a bathroom in our Lonoke house. The color I’ve chosen is Pantone Color Institute’s color of the year, “Living Coral. That places me among the elite cadre of tasteful aficionados who cherish the dernier cri. Look:

So, why the guilt? Am I killing the soul of this antique table by converting it to a “splash of color?” After all, when it was first utilized, there was no such thing as color in poor rural homes, only drab furniture on the floor, and newspapers pasted on the walls and ceilings.

Am I demeaning history?

It gets worse. Taking Herself to Lowes to seek out the Color of the Year, I found the closest thing I could and suggested it.

“No.”

“What?”

“Here.” She pointed.

Now, raw courage came into play. At the risk of divorce at best and a session with “Mr. Louisville” at worst, I managed, in as strong a voice as I could manage, on the floor of Lowes, “My precious. I love you like Jesus loves a sinner. And if a hand grenade bounced down the aisle, I would jump atop it to save you.”

“But?”

“But, Navy Blue is not ‘a splash of color.’”

It still stands in limbo. Anonymous suggestions would be welcomed.

My Redacted Life: Pets of all sorts

We had been married maybe six months and were enjoying the home we purchased on the GI Bill. My beautiful, long-haired redhead—no longer long-haired and no longer a redhead, but still breathtakingly beautiful—decided we needed a dog. Six months of marriage had been enough to teach me that total and complete acquiescence greatly trumped any attempt at Pauline male dominance.

So she found a dog, and thus began a, so-far, 46 year-old family protocol. Feeling Biblical that day, we named him Jeremiah. He was a mutt, black with orange circles above his eyes, perhaps evolutionarily designed to convince predators that he was awake, when actually he was sleeping, which was most of the time.

Having grown to adulthood, he discovered the joy of eating, or attempting to eat, anything left within reach. He particularly enjoyed my treasured edition of Victorian poetry, but he shunned no potential meals. This brought him into contact with Marcel the Mystery Plant.

Marcel was a gift from a neo-hippy friend named Wes. With a gnome-like appearance and a taste for all things from the 1960s, he was a favorite with young kids who hung out at the Art Center. Thus, we understood it when he brought us a small container of soil and a mystery seed, explaining that some of the kids who gathered at his place were untrustworthy, whatever that meant.

We planted the seed and cared for the resulting plant. Of course, being good Methodists, we had no idea what kind of plant it was, but we nourished the slender young thing, awaiting our friend’s return for it. Going through a Gaulian phase, we named it Marcel.

It had grown to approximately a foot in height, with nice, long, serrated leaves when Jeremiah noticed it. It sat in a quiet corner of the kitchen where watering was simple and, since we feared there was something vaguely sinister about it, out of sight from most visitors.

Well anyway, Jeremiah quietly watched Marcel grow, giving us no indication of impending “planticide.”

Then one Sabbath morning, Marcel was gone, nipped down to soil level. Jeremiah lay beside it with the spots over his eyes doing a sort of “ping-pong” dance over the most innocent-looking canine face one could imagine. Every once in awhile, he would make this dog-moan, like Lassie had just walked by wearing a bikini.

It got worse. Brenda was cooking breakfast when her mother called to inquire about any intentions we had of attending church services that day. It took some time for her to employ her best prevarication skills and get us excused. When she returned to the kitchen, the remnants of an entire package of raw bacon lay scattered about the kitchen floor.

An emergency?

She thought so, and demanded that I find a vet who answered calls on Sunday. For once in our marriage, I refused a direct order, saying, “You call one and explain what just happened."

We compromised. I sat in a chair and watched Jeremiah for any sign of seizures or fits. He had none. Rather, he just belched bacon grease for several hours, hummed tunes like “Come on Over to the Other Side,” and from time to time looked up at me and said, “Far out man.” His eye spots danced in rhythm with the music and he would shake his head from side to side, especially when he did, “Don’t Bogart That Joint, My Friend.”

We lost a pound of bacon that day. Jeremiah lost his innocence. Marcel lost his life. Our friend Wes lost his safe house, and the 1960s lost some of the allure that had drifted with us along a smoke-filled path through time.

Jeremiah stayed with us, apparently un-phased by the experience, for 16 years. I don’t like to talk about the day he passed over the Rainbow Bridge, so we’ll leave him with the memory of moaning, “My Sweet Lady Jane.”

Yeah, I know. She's never
held me like that.

Why we are who we are

It’s interesting. There are approximately four billion DNA base pairs, or letters, that make up the human genome, an organism's complete set of DNA. Think about that for a moment.

While you are thinking, consider that a typical internal combustion engine car has about 10,000 moving parts.

Oh, you science majors may say that is a false comparison. That doesn’t make it less interesting. Science haters may say that it is false news. They learned so on Facebook. That doesn’t make things less scary.

Anyway, think about how many moving parts must operate in both unison and harmony for an automobile to be a Honda Accord instead of a Jeep Cherokee. Of course, an automobile is not the direct product of evolutionary forces acting unaided upon, as it now seems accepted, the genetic structure of an existing body. That’s why we can put it in working order with 10,000 moving parts.

That’s also why it took three billion DNA pairs and four billion years to produce a modern member of Homo sapiens. Now that’s a lot of connections working at once, the product of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” Some connections serve uses that are no longer needed. Some confuse us. I read somewhere once that there is a genetic mechanism in our makeup that served to keep us alert when we shared the Savannah with creatures that ate humans for breakfast, lunch, and supper. No, it didn’t serve to warn us of danger. It warned us of a perceived lack of danger, for a feeling of safety may be the most dangerous condition of all in a violent world.

In other words, “You think things are fine? Think again.”

Could that archaic mechanism be what makes it counter-productive to tell a person suffering from chronic depression to, “Cheer up. Everything is going to be all right?”

Why do I bring this all up? It evolves (no pun intended) from a sermon I heard yesterday, full of the love and grace that eludes most TV evangelists. It included a story of a young man who was almost suicidal because his 3 billion DNA pairs had produced a sexual orientation that differed from his parents, siblings, and the majority of his peers. Why the difference? I don’t know. Multiply 3 billion DNA pairs times four billion years and look therein for the answer.

Do I understand it correctly from my friends who are fundamentalist evangelicals that we are somehow spiritually ordained to hate a person who has a slight difference in his genomic makeup from mine?

Am I supposed to assume that this slight difference is not the result of DNA but the result of a conscious decision by a fourteen-year old that puberty, psychic anxiety, fear of the future, a lack of popularity among peers, and a world seemingly gone insane does not produce enough psychic terror in one’s life? That, in order to round things out, he or she might just choose to adopt a lifestyle that would make them an object of un-reasoned hatred in members of society, including the adults who are supposed to be in charge?

I once knew an individual who thought so. “It’s a choice,” this person avowed, “a result of our ‘old sin nature’ generated by the Devil himself.”

Our what? Only someone as nefarious and full of venom as Franklin Graham could believe that.

As a side note, this individual assured me that a college professor had taught his class, at a central Arkansas university (not my Alma Mater thankfully), that a homosexual could be identified by a certain bump at a location in a certain place on their forehead.

I can’t find one on mine, although I do think Orlando Bloom is awfully sexy.

Anyway, this post-factual age could get me down if I didn’t occasionally run across thoughtful, caring, loving sermons like the one I saw yesterday. Contact me for a source.

There is hope. Study and believe.

Riches, divorce, and Girl Scout cookies ...

Just finished “Theology Hour” for this Sunday morn. I know. I know. “Heatherns” have no right to study what the Galilean said. But he assured me it was okay. In fact, he even asked me a couple of questions. We, the two of us, have our “coffee-talkee” early on Sunday mornings. So we had a nice visit today, although he was an hour late. Don’t ask me what he thinks of Daylight Savings Time. Anyway, we talked.

First, he wanted to know what kind of Bible people had that was signed by a man who has had a couple of unjustified (his words) divorces and who worships riches above all things?

“Wasn’t I pretty clear about that?”

“Seemed so to me,” I said, “but remember that I tend toward secular humanism.”

“I don’t judge you for that,” he said, “even told the Pope so.” In fact, that brings up another point.”

I waited.

“Girl Scout cookies,” he said. That made me look his way. “I like Girl Scout cookies,” he said. “Especially the Thin Mints. ‘Johnnie the B-Man’ likes the Shortbreads. Says they remind him of the taste of raw honey. The rest of our bunch likes any of them, as long as they don’t have to pay for them.” He made a humorous squinting face and said, in a mocking falsetto voice nodding his head from left to right, “If you can make water into wine, surely you can make mud pies into Girl Scout cookies.”

“Girl Scout cookies?”

“Didn’t I read where some jerk hates a woman in a different political party who was a Girl Scout, so he wants to boycott their cookies?”

“I think so. Is there anything you’d like to pass along to him and his people?”

“Yeah,” he said. “If you get the chance, tell them that they’d better not make me come back down there again.”

He was getting into a mood, so we finished our coffee and he parted. I picked up the Scriptures again, the volume that doesn’t redact the parts about riches, divorce, judging others, the Sermon on the Mount, and the 25^th Chapter of Matthew, i.e. the “autographable version.”

Next week, I think I’ll take up the Parable of the Prodigal Son. That one has always bothered me, for I’ve felt at times that my parents always favored my brother over me. If you have any ideas, I’d welcome them.

As we would say in the Sixties, “Peas and harmony grits.”

Saying goodbye ....

Finally said goodbye to the brother today. Time to move on. I let go of a lot of stuff, junk mostly. What I kept were some memories of the best times we ever had together.

It was back in 1970. When I left Vietnam, I wound up on a Navy ship in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the meanest cities to strangers in the U.S. at that time. Meantime, he had enlisted in the United State Marines for reasons known only to himself. After boot camp and schooling, he ended up at Camp Lejeune in southern North Carolina for some sort of advanced training. It was close enough to where my ship docked that we got together weekends when we could.

The people and police in Charleston hated blacks, servicemen, and people who had come there since 1680 in pretty much equal proportions. Scoring two out of three, I needed all the friendly faces I could find. So, brother and I spent some weekends there, often in the company of James Huddleston from Thayer, Missouri and/or Sidney Bussey from Douglas, Georgia. My brother had no civilian clothes, so we all wore uniforms, which meant that it was best for us to stay out of sight as best we could. We three sailors had seen what the local peacekeepers could do to one of our breed after seeing a few of them carried aboard the ship after exceeding some local rule or other.

It wasn’t a pretty sight, so we avoided the good people of Charleston as best we could.

It was enough for us simply to find an affordable motel room and spend time just watching TV, drinking beer, and lying around without being yelled at during a weekend, quite suitable for lonely men far from home. You had to be there. It lasted for several months before an incurable allergic reaction to combat-boot leather ended his career with an honorable discharge, a promotion to Lance Corporal, and orders to Westpac, i.e. Vietnam, laying on the Personnel Officer’s desk.

Once, just the two of us had a little extra money and landed in a pretty nice motel with a friendly bar next door. Too friendly I guess. I woke up the next morning with no memory of walking back. With that great smile of his, he explained it. I had made it fine until we reached the bottom of the stairs leading to our second-floor room. Thereupon, I needed help up, like a sinner being led to salvation.

He wasn’t a big man, my brother. But with muscles toned by the Marine Corps, he was making steady but noisy progress until we were halfway up the stairs. When the manager of the motel came out to check on the commotion, he asked if help was needed.

According to a now long-time family legend, the response was fast and firm. “He ain’t heavy mister. He’s my brother.” I have no proof that it happened that way, but, as they said in the John Wayne movie, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It's one of the stories he would tell until he died.

So I leave you with this. It’s a song about a wandering performer, but it made me think of my brother and, given his love for all things Jimmy Buffett, I choose it with which to say goodbye.

Some stories are worth telling.
Some may not be.

A Blessing After a Tough Day

I received a late-evening blessing yesterday after a tough month. Ironically, I also received some of the best thoughts on urban planning I’ve heard in ages, all from a self-made millionaire.

It happened this way.

After experiencing the lingering death of two family members, and two funerals within a week, I was deflated and exhausted, ready for a “Maker’s and Three Cubes,” and some meaningless TV. Then I received a call from a close relative in my hometown where the second funeral had occurred only hours before.

I groaned, but answered. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but maybe he was needing a friendly voice. So, we talked. For a brief background, let’s just say that this individual rose from being homeless (no, not on the street but borrowing a spot on the floor of a friend’s college dormitory room) to working on his second, or third (I’m not sure) million, in two decades.

He made his first the hard way. He worked for it. An old man taught him to repair HVAC systems and he eventually started his own company. After years of hot August days in attics around town, he gained a reputation as being good at his craft, honest, and one who treats everyone he worked for, “the same.” That last descriptor is a positive one in my hometown.

See, my hometown is a bi-racial city. That means it deals with challenges that all-white communities don’t recognize, believing instead that their superior righteousness accounts for all their success. My hometown must deal with mistrust and prejudices that began shortly after companies in Europe started sending settlers to take over the New Land in the 1600s. It also must deal with the lingering effects of a people who, back in the day, no matter how righteous they were, and how hard they worked, were denied access to The Avenue of Success.

Now to this individual’s second million. He began investing, a few years back, in houses that had once served middle class white families. (If you are unfamiliar with that term, look it up in an economic history of the U.S.). These were sound houses that could be purchased at a discount in my hometown and rented for a positive, but not onerous, cash flow.

It has worked well for him and we drifted into a discussion about it. He explained the cash flow system and how he felt he was preserving a valuable housing stock in the city from ultimate deterioration.

“My concern,” I said, “would be getting reliable renters.” Friends know that my home town doesn’t share the same good reputation as “white-flight” or “sundown” cities. We mostly read about its problems.

Showing some impatience, he replied, “Let me tell you something. There is a strong population in this city of black families who work just like we do and want the same things we do: a good job, a decent place to live—to rent if they have to until they can afford to own—and are as reliable tenants as you can find. I have no problems. My renters want to work and to do well.”

“So why,” I said, “do we not hear accounts of this strong black middle class in the city? We just hear about the problems.”

“Beats me,” he said. “Ask your friends in the news business.”

I changed the subject. “Are there any new homes being built in the city?”

“A few,” he said. “There would be more if the city would clean up some junky spots and make land available in stable areas.” ("Junky spots." Urban planners don't use that term. Too bad.)

“And? Does it?”

“No, they want to plant trees on Main Street to solve our problems. And some college kids came down and solved things. Someone told them that if they would build a giant Ferris Wheel by the lake, folks would flock here to see it.”

Yes, I thought, there is a lingering belief among some in our state that urban planning is so simple college kids can do it. I changed the subject again. “And what effect will this proposed casino have on your middle-class population?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not a good one.”

“So you are saying things would work out better if the city concentrated on improving the basics of life?”

“The people I rent to deserve a path to continue improving their lives,” he said.

Probably, I thought. If they have that, the future of the city will take care of itself.

I thought about all those fancy-assed urban design consultants that Arkansas cities bring in from New York. Then I thought about what this man was telling me. (Disclosure: He’s my nephew and I’m proud of him).

Maybe, just maybe, I can learn more from him about urban planning that I could from some arrogant jerk from “Back East.”

Further, maybe, just maybe, we fall into the trap, in my profession, of listening to the wrong people.

It's simple really.
Why make it hard?